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Soa 2019
CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES
Issue 11
CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDY SOFIA
ADVANCED ACADEMIA PROGRAMME
2018–2019
The following publication presents part
of the author’s research carried out under
the Advanced Academia Programme
of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia.
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CAS Working Paper Series No. 11/2019
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Preferred Citation: Venkov, Nikola A., Conviviality vs politics of coexistence: Going
beyond the Global North. CAS Working Paper Series No. 11/2019: Soa 2019. Ad-
vanced Academia programme, a project of the Centre for Advanced Study Soa.
NIKOLA A. VENKOV
CONVIVIALITY VS POLITICS OF COEXISTENCE:
GOING BEYOND THE GLOBAL NORTH
Abstract:
e notions of conviviality, everyday multiculturalism, ordinary cosmo-
politanism focus on how people live together in contexts of cultural diver-
sity. However, discussion has been to a large degree limited to the context
of the postcolonial Global North metropolis. Taking it further aeld helps
reveal a number of conceptual aws. To resolve them the debate should
move from looking at techniques of living together to the politics of liv-
ing together.
is paper brings post-communist Eastern Europe into the debate through
the case study of a street market in Soa, Bulgaria. It is argued that the
everyday encounter of dierent social strata in an urban space gives rise
to similar tensions as the mixing of cultures and ethnicities. e notion of
social multiculture is therefore introduced along the lines of Paul Gilroy’s
“everyday multiculture”. Importantly, in the East European context deeply
ingrained norms of civility do not protect from outspoken expressions of
racism, nor is cultural or social mixing much celebrated. It is such social
contexts that permit a study of how inter-ethnic and inter-class diversity
are truly negotiated from below.
Keywords:
everyday multiculture, multiculturalism, conviviality, geography of en-
counter, politics of coexistence, social multiculture, discourse theory
A burgeoning field of research has been seeking to theorise the capacity of
mixed communities in metropolitan cities of the Global North to sustain a
high degree of cultural diversity. This avenue has been taken at a time in which
social scientists are grappling with the rising spirit of popular and political
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disappointment with public policies that go under the moniker of multicultur-
alism.1 In an era of ever more global and dynamic migrant flows, societies of
the Global North are falling back to concerns about intercultural conflicts and
social cohesion.2 In such a political context, it is thought of as important to turn
scientific attention toward the reality of living together in places of existing
diversity. Research of this kind would show how “intercultural conflicts” there
are quite unremarkable and resolved on a daily basis. It would demonstrate that
successful “multicultures” (as opposed to “multiculturalism”) have existed in
the researchers’ countries for decades already. It is a turn to the ethnographic
method that has to locate grounds for hope by undertaking more focused inves-
tigation of practice, as discourses based on intellectual argumentation, such as
multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and even liberalism, are experiencing set-
backs. Such a project weds both scientific and political (normative) motives.
Politically, it sets itself on a course against the dominant narratives of disas-
ter: those of “failed integration”, “segregated neighbourhoods”, “parallel lives”,
“immigrant criminality” and suchlike. At the same time, it is deeply interested
in understanding and theorising what makes people, communities, spaces, or
encounters equipped to overcome the potentiality of turning difference into
tension and conflict.
In this paper, I will critically engage with both the political and the analytic aims of
this collection of research. On the one hand, I will ask – can we really nd reasons
for hope, to what extent, and from what vantage points, when we are searching
for it in the phenomena of spontaneously constructed, bottom-up, modes of liv-
ing together, or “living-with-dierence”.3 On the other hand, I will scrutinise the
theoretical apparatus hitherto employed to analyse those processes. e research
debate on living with dierence has suered from conceptual confusion and met a
number of serious criticisms. A plethora of terms have been put into service, while
some of them have received discordant meanings and uses.
I will argue that there is an inherent tension between the political and the analytic
program and this is the cause for at least part of the problems from which work
in this strand has suered. e analytic research program is about grasping how
people living in multicultures deal with what they are thrown into. Progress, how-
ever, is hampered by an embedded normative urge that reorients research eorts.
is normative program is about nding evidence that people are keen, or able, or
just have the potential, to adapt to living-with-dierence. Tellingly, there is no one
1 Magdalena Nowicka and Steven Vertovec, “Comparing Convivialities: Dreams and Realities of
Living-With-Dierence,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 342.
2 Anne-Marie Fortier, “Proximity by Design? Aective Citizenship and the Management of
Unease,” Citizenship Studies 14, no. 1 (2010): 17–30; Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessen-
dorf, eds., Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices (London
and New York: Routledge, 2010); Steven Vertovec, “Towards Post-Multiculturalism? Changing
Communities, Conditions and Contexts of Diversity,” International Social Science Journal 61,
no. 199 (2010): 83–95.
3 Nowicka and Vertovec, “Comparing Convivialities.”
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standard about what various publications propose as the “grounds for hope for the
future” that they are striving to uncover; rather, we see a gamut of concessions that
authors have been forced by their research ndings to make.
To clarify matters, we need to disentangle normative intent from the analytic and
I claim that it is best to do that at the level of basic working notions. By the end
of the paper I will do just that by proposing to limit the employment of one of the
most often used and most debated terms, conviviality, to doing normative labour
at certain analytical scales, while re-founding analysis on the basis of a new, more
value-neutral concept – politics of coexistence.
In looking for the answers to these issues, I will venture beyond the usual sites of
the metropolitan Global North in order to de-universalise and contextualise the
discussion’s many taken-for-granted premises and established conclusions. I will
bring to the debate the East-European context, where positive discourses on diver-
sity, tolerance and acceptance have had little purchase over society. I will look at
a site in Soa, Bulgaria, where inter-ethnic and inter-class diversity is negotiated
from the bottom-up despite being thoroughly repudiated by the existing social and
political hegemony.
Drawing on the challenges that my own and others’ studies have met in con-
texts beyond the multicultural postcolonial metropolis, I construct the argu-
ment that a major shift in perspective is in order for the debate to continue to
be productive. Researchers have to move from looking at the techniques for
living together to the politics of living together. is move requires a new, so-
ciologically grounded, theoretical methodology, which the concept “politics of
coexistence” integrates.
STUDIES IN THE CONVIVIAL TURN
A multitude of working terms have been put forward in an attempt to advance
the aforementioned project and to capture an object of analysis. e proposed
concepts include “ordinary cosmopolitanisms”,4 “multiculture” and “conviviality”,5
4 Michèle Lamont and Sada Aksartova, “Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridg-
ing Racial Boundaries Among Working-Class Men,” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 4
(2002): 1–25.
5 Paul Gilroy, Aer Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).
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“everyday multiculturalism”,6 “convivència”,7 “cosmopolitan sociability”,8 “common-
place diversity”,9 “making multiculturalism”,10 and others.
ere is no conceptual unity of the debate and here I will avoid discussing the
convergences and divergences in this pool of terms. ey have been drawn togeth-
er under the shorthand names everyday multiculture approach11 or the convivial
turn.12 e convivial turn is a site of convergence for strands of curiosity emerg-
ing in dierent disciplines: geography, cultural studies, urban studies, sociology,
anthropology... Some of the concepts listed above might be largely overlapping in
scope but push away from dierent earlier debates, such as those on multicultural-
ism and cosmopolitanism.13 Some terms dier in being trained at dierent aspects
of the process of cross-cultural interaction. For example, variations on cosmopoli-
tanism (“ordinary”, “everyday”, “working class”, “vernacular”, have all been mobil-
ised by dierent authors), “cosmopolitan habits”,14 “intercultural habitus”15 indicate
interest in the individual dispositions or the tactics that equip ordinary people to
engage in cross-cultural relationships. In contrast, “everyday multiculturalism”,
“commonplace diversity” and “conviviality” are relational concepts, with more sug-
gestive than concretely dened content. I will briey touch upon them in order to
give the uninitiated reader some sense of the stakes and achievements relating to
the everyday multiculture approach.
e everyday multiculturalism agenda has emerged in the Australian academic
context16 and focuses on uncovering how in a society which was ocially con-
6 Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham, eds., Everyday Multiculturalism. (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
7 Brad Erickson, “Utopian Virtues: Muslim Neighbors, Ritual Sociality, and the Politics of Con-
vivència,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 1 (2011): 114–31.
8 Nina Glick Schiller, Tsypylma Darieva, and Sandra Gruner-Domic, “Dening Cosmopolitan Socia-
bility in a Transnational Age. An Introduction,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 3 (2011): 399–418.
9 Susanne Wessendorf, “Commonplace Diversity and the ‘Ethos of Mixing’: Perceptions of Dier-
ence in a London Neighbourhood,” Identities 20, no. 4 (2013): 407–22.
10 Sophie Watson, “Making Multiculturalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 15 (2016): 2635–52.
11 Sarah Neal et al., “Living Multiculture: Understanding the New Spatial and Social Relations of
Ethnicity and Multiculture in England,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy
31, no. 2 (2013): 308–23.
12 Linda Lapiņa, “Besides Conviviality: Paradoxes in Being ‘at Ease’ with Diversity in a Copenhagen
District,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 6, no. 1 (2016): 33–41; Anoop Nayak, “Purging the
Nation: Race, Conviviality and Embodied Encounters in the Lives of British Bangladeshi Muslim
Young Women,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42, no. 2 (2017): 289–302.
13 I touched upon the trajectory of the former in the introduction; for the latter see, e.g., Sheldon Pol-
lock et al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 577–89; Pnina Werbner, “Global
Pathways. Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds,” So-
cial Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1999): 17–35.
14 Greg Noble, “Cosmopolitan Habits: e Capacities and Habitats of Intercultural Conviviality,”
Body & Society 19, no. 2–3 (2013): 162–85.
15 Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism: Some Brief
Comparisons between Singapore and Sydney,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4
(2014): 406–30.
16 Anita Harris, “Shiing the Boundaries of Cultural Spaces: Young People and Everyday Multicul-
turalism,” Social Identities 15, no. 2 (2009): 187–205; Christina Ho, “Respecting the Presence of
Others: School Micropublics and Everyday Multiculturalism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 32,
no. 6 (2011): 603–19; Michele Lobo, “Everyday Multiculturalism: Catching the Bus in Darwin,
Australia,” Social & Cultural Geography 15, no. 7 (2014): 714–29; Jon Stratton, “Two Rescues,
One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” Social Identities 12, no. 6 (2006): 662; Wise and
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strued as multicultural and shaped by decades of multicultural policies, multicul-
turalism unfolds on the ground. Authors look at the interactions between parents
around school activities in a diverse public school,17 at the eorts put in by work-
ing-class colleagues in a diverse workplace to sustain friendly cross-cultural rela-
tions and create a sense of community,18 at charismatic individuals that engage in
bridge-building and “connecting work” for others.19 Taken together, these studies
give an impression of the scale of the countless daily acts of ordinary people that
build Australia’s multicultural society on the ground (in addition to acts of harm
and racism20).
Commonplace diversity, introduced by Susanne Wessendorf, aims to capture the
nonchalant attitude towards cultural dierence by the inhabitants of Hackney in
London, one of the most densely diverse areas in the UK today (only 36.2% of the
population is White British). She writes that “ey rarely ask each other where
they come from and are not really interested in the other’s origins because every-
body comes from elsewhere, and it is therefore not a particularly special topic to
talk about.”21 Despite the intense mixing of people of dierent religions, hailing
from at least 58 countries, the dierence between them becomes banal. Rather
than causing tensions, it is dealt with through an adaptation of the familiar norma-
tive codes of civility to strangers in the city. Interestingly, Wessendorf nds that the
two groups which are cultivating resentment are a growing population of Hipsters,
as well as a community of strictly Orthodox Jews, because both demographics are
judged as keeping to themselves and not sharing in the area’s “ethos of mixing”.22
e accounts from Hackney demonstrate that a highly mixed society is possible
and non-threatening.
Conviviality was made popular when Paul Gilroy employed it to name “the pro-
cesses of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary
feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas and in postcolonial cities elsewhere.”23
Conviviality, or “a convivial type of culture”, is the specic practice born in navi-
gating “everyday multiculture”, the “creative, intuitive capacity among ordinary
Velayutham, Everyday Multiculturalism; Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Mul-
ticulturalism.”
17 Greg Noble, “Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community,” in Wise
and Velayutham, Everyday Multiculturalism, 46–65; Noble, “Cosmopolitan Habits.”
18 Amanda Wise, “Convivial Labour and the ‘Joking Relationship’: Humour and Everyday Multicul-
turalism at Work,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 37, no. 5 (2016): 481–500.
19 Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism”; Amanda Wise, “Everyday
Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans,” in Wise and Vela-
yutham, Everyday Multiculturalism, 21–45.
20 Greg Noble, “e Discomfort of Strangers: Racism, Incivility and Ontological Security in a Re-
laxed and Comfortable Nation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 1–2 (2005): 107–20.
21 Susanne Wessendorf, “‘Being Open, But Sometimes Closed’. Conviviality in a Super-Diverse Lon-
don Neighbourhood,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 396.
22 Wessendorf, “Commonplace Diversity,” 414–15.
23 Gilroy, Aer Empire, xi.
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people, who manage those tensions.”24 It is seen as an unrecognised resource for
reinventing wider British civic culture and British politics.25
In this paper I turn my attention specically to the notion of conviviality. It seems
to have become the conceptual focal point for most eorts made to theorise and
valorise how people and communities negotiate pre-existing group dierences.
It has sustained the most complex engagement by the literature so far (includ-
ing three special issues, introduced by Nowicka and Vertovec,26 Wise and Noble,27
andMarsden and Reeves28). Although it is a purposefully ambiguous term, it has
caused a reorganisation of the eld of studies in which I am interested. It has
merged with and re-invigorated discussions that were previously even more dis-
persed – for example, those on “living-with-dierence”,29 “rubbing along”,30 every-
day multiculturalism,31 the intercultural encounter.32 Its ambiguity has triggered a
swathe of eorts to operationalise conviviality into a notion suitable for analytical
and empirical work. Authors are trying to understand what conviviality looks like
in practice; how and why it unfolds; even, whether it could be enhanced and fos-
tered by intervention or urban design.33
NATIONAL CONTEXTS AND HEGEMONIC CULTURE
In this paper I will challenge the concepts of the convivial turn with the task of in-
terpreting ethnographic eldwork from an urban site that diers in principle from
the contexts for which the notion of conviviality was initially formulated. Nowicka
and Vertovec remark that the bottom-up practice of conviviality is not necessar-
ily dependent on and shaped by the elite political discourses that try to promote
diversity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, etc.34 ere is a problem here, how-
24 Paul Gilroy, “Colonial Crimes and Convivial Cultures” (paper, “Rethinking Nordic Colonialism”
exhibition, Nuuk, Greenland, 2006), 6.
25 Paul Gilroy, “Multiculture in Times of War: An Inaugural Lecture Given at the London School of
Economics,” Critical Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2006): 27–45; Sivamohan Valluvan, “Conviviality and
Multiculture: A Post-Integration Sociology of Multi-Ethnic Interaction,” Young 24, no. 3 (2016):
204–21; Valluvan, “e Uses and Abuses of Class: Le Nationalism and the Denial of Working
Class Multiculture,” e Sociological Review 67, no. 1 (2019): 36–46.
26 Nowicka and Vertovec, “Comparing Convivialities.”
27 Amanda Wise and Greg Noble, “Convivialities: An Orientation,” Journal of Intercultural Studies
37, no. 5 (2016): 423–31.
28 Magnus Marsden and Madeleine Reeves, “Marginal Hubs: On Conviviality Beyond the Urban in
Asia: Introduction,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (2019): 755–75.
29 Nowicka and Vertovec, “Comparing Convivialities.”
30 Sophie Watson, City Publics: e (Dis) enchantments of Urban Encounters (London: Routledge, 2006).
31 Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism.”
32 Gill Valentine, “Living With Dierence: Reections on Geographies of Encounter,” Progress in
Human Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 323–37.
33 See Nowicka and Vertovec, “Comparing Convivialities,” 347–49.
34 Ibid., 346.
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ever: almost all research to date has taken place in Global North metropolises,
where those discourses are well established. What the typical special issue of-
fers us is “accounts of ‘convivial multiculture’ from Montreal, Melbourne, Sydney
and London.”35
Valentine has pointed out that a lot of the celebrated “openness” to dierence
found in case studies could be explained by deeply ingrained norms of civility.36
e capacity for maintaining a commonplace diversity and an ethos of mixing37
or a civility towards diversity38 might not depend so much on daily exposure to
dierence, but on the imperative of civil inattention, as several authors have not-
ed.39 is is an important analytical distinction because it moves the terms of the
debate beyond dwelling on the characteristics of urban sites (by authors such as
Ash Amin) and on to those of the hegemonic national culture.40 For example, stud-
ies which celebrate ethnically mixed street marketplaces as sites of “co-mingling
of dierences” that work to “dissolve divisions and open up new possibilities for
sociality and engagement”41 y in the face of the eldwork that I will present below
about a street marketplace in Soa. When and to what extent boundaries might be
destabilised rather than hardened needs to be carefully scrutinised and qualied.
Similarly, the signicance of the hegemonic public censure of open racism in con-
temporary British society is ignored by practically all British research. Only two
authors in the reviewed literature were confronted in their data by reports from
informants that they feel obliged to constrain their conduct in social settings, as
they were feeling that it is policed by the dominant norms of politeness and/or
“political correctness”.42 My claim is that hegemonic discourses play a large part in
determining the outcome of intercultural encounters.43 However, because the ma-
jority of work in the everyday multiculture approach has taken place in a select few
national contexts (and rather similar ones at that) it is precisely the host society’s
hegemonic cultural patterns and norms that have not found a place in the analyti-
cal gaze of concepts such as conviviality.
35 Wise and Noble, “Convivialities,” 428.
36 Valentine, “Living With Dierence,” 328; Gill Valentine and Joanna Sadgrove, “Lived Dierence:
A Narrative Account of Spatiotemporal Processes of Social Dierentiation,” Environment and
Planning A 44, no. 9 (2012): 2050.
37 Wessendorf, “Commonplace Diversity.”
38 Wessendorf, “Being Open.”
39 Hannah Jones et al., “Urban Multiculture and Everyday Encounters in Semi-Public, Franchised
Cafe Spaces,” e Sociological Review 63, no. 3 (2015): 644–61; omas Sealy, “Multiculturalism,
Interculturalism, ‘Multiculture’ and Super-Diversity: Of Zombies, Shadows and Other Ways of
Being,” Ethnicities 18, no. 5 (2018): 702.
40 I understand culture in the wider anthropological sense of shared patterns of doing things.
41 Sophie Watson, “Brief Encounters of an Unpredictable Kind: Everyday Multiculturalism in ree
London Street Markets,” in Wise and Velayutham, Everyday Multiculturalism, 125– 39; Watson,
“e Magic of the Marketplace: Sociality in a Neglected Public Space,” Urban Studies 46, no. 8
(2009): 1577–91.
42 John Clayton, “Everyday Geographies of Marginality and Encounter in the Multicultural City,”
in New Geographies of Race and Racism, ed. Claire Dwyer and Caroline Bressey (Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2008), 259; Valentine, “Living With Dierence.”
43 Here, I understand discourses not only as symbolic but also material; in general – as systems of
perception.
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Bringing Eastern Europe to the debate on conviviality requires that all these as-
sumptions be reected upon. I introduce next a social context where norms of
civility do not protect from outspoken expression of racism, nor is cultural and so-
cial mixing much celebrated. It is in such a context that inter-ethnic and inter-class
diversity is truly negotiated from below.
INTRODUCING THE WOMEN’S MARKET OF SOFIA
e Women’s Market (“Zhenski Pazar”, a historical appellation) is a lively, open-air,
food and wares marketplace located in the centre of Soa, the capital of Bulgaria.
It is the largest marketplace in the city, occupying a wide pedestrian boulevard. For
nearly a century it was the busiest shopping place in the city, but with the collapse
of the state economy after 1989 and the growing scarcity of goods, business there
really boomed.44 It attracted a daily ow of visitors reaching, by some accounts,
one-fth of Soa’s population in the early 1990s. Four rows of stalls and pavilions
formed two tunnel-like alleys where the passer-by would be solicited from both
sides to buy all kinds of imports from Istanbul, stocks from surviving Bulgarian
production lines or individuals’ improvised home production: clothes, shoes, tools
and replacement parts, craft wares, untaxed cigarettes, fruit and vegetables, meat,
packaged and unpackaged foods, live sh, homemade or industrial food, pastries
or barbecue, etc., etc.
Organisation of the market became highly informal (but not without its power
structures). Many sellers lled the spaces between the stalls or simply walked
through the crowds of buyers, displaying merchandise in their hands. e trucks
of state socialist village cooperatives and the daily commuting villagers were su-
perseded by families from the countryside, camping every week on the street to
keep an eye on their goods and old car. Some of them would eventually settle in the
neighbourhood and professionalise as vendors, renting someone’s garage as a ware-
house. e Women’s Market was integrated in the booming cross-border “suitcase
trade”45 as its main endpoint in the capital city. Just from selling gaskets for home
appliances one “could make an apartment or two or three.”46 e Women’s Market
became a potent ladder for social mobility for a populace that was undergoing a
process of mass declassing.
44 Nikola A. Venkov, “Assembling the Post-Socialist Marketplace: Transitions and Regeneration
Projects at the Central Pazar of Soa,” EthnoAnthropoZoom/ЕтноАнтропоЗум 17 (2018): 229–79.
45 Yulian Konstantinov, “Patterns of Reinterpretation: Trader-Tourism in the Balkans (Bulgaria) As
a Picaresque Metaphorical Enactment of Post-Totalitarianism,” American Ethnologist 23, no. 4
(1996): 762–82.
46 Venkov, “Assembling the Post-Socialist Marketplace.”
“
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e rst Vietnamese, Chinese, and Arab entrepreneurs quickly recognised the po-
tential of the place for business and laid the ground for the multicultural character
of the area today. Later, many Roma people found opportunities for economic sur-
vival here in a wider context of unemployment and growing anti-Roma prejudices.
ey found a niche for self-employment as petty traders and vendors.47 Roma from
all over Bulgaria started to settle in the neighbourhood.
e 2000s brought with them an onslaught of Western supermarket chains and
Western-style shopping malls. Although the number of visitors to the Women’s
Market was falling, the market had found a stable niche as the only remaining area
catering to the needs of the poorest groups in Bulgarian society. For example, in
2013 some 40 to 70 thousand people still passed through the market daily. At that
moment in time, however, the municipality undertook a project of redevelopment
of the market. It was an attempt at state-led gentrication that would reduce petty
trading and the socially mixed character of the area and make it more suitable
for shopping and leisure of the newly re-emerging middle classes.48 e market
proper was curtailed drastically and replaced with a pedestrian space with small
shops, an art gallery, street food events, etc. However, just as construction started,
Bulgaria’s “refugee crisis” occurred, in the autumn of 2013.49 Despite the rather
small number of migrants and asylum-seekers that entered the country (in the few
thousands, due to the notoriously harsh treatment by Bulgarian border police),
in the local public, media and political space they were construed as a dangerous
threat. Because of the pre-existing Middle Eastern presence, most of those who
reached Soa sought sanctuary in the area of the Women’s Market. e zone added
a second stigmatising name, “Little Beirut”, to an earlier one, “the Gypsy Market”,
and the gentrication ambitions of the redevelopment project wilted.
In the next sections I will refer primarily to the period up to and including 2013, as
this is when I conducted the bulk of my eldwork. I will discuss here only a couple
of ethnographic vignettes, but my understanding of the social constellation around
the market is based on four years of relationship to the eld site, over a hundred
interviews, and a number of extended initiatives of engaged anthropology.50
47 See also Yulian Konstantinov, “Hunting for Gaps rough Boundaries: Gypsy Tactics for Eco-
nomic Survival in the Context of the Second Phase of Post-Totalitarian Changes in Bulgaria,”
Innovation: e European Journal of Social Science Research 7, no. 3 (1994): 237–48.
48
For more, see Nikola A. Venkov, “Conspiracy Narratives at the Women’s Market,” Seminar_BG 3
(2016)
, https://www.seminar-bg.eu/spisanie-seminar-bg/special-issue-3/item/451-conspiracy-
narratives-at-the-womens-market.html; Venkov, “Assembling the Post-Socialist Marketplace,” 243.
49 See Lyubomir Kyuchukov, Impact of the Refugee Crisis on Bulgarian Society and Politics: Fears
But No Hatred (Soa: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiung, Oce Bulgaria, 2016).
50 Nikola A. Venkov, “Джентрификация на Женския пазар – конструиране на градски
политики и трансформация на местните отношения” [Gentrication of the Women’s Market:
construction of urban policies and transformation of local relationships] (PhD dissertation, Uni-
versity of Soa, 2017).
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EVERYDAY MULTICULTURE
AND PAUL GILROY’S CONVIVIALITY
One can summarise the variety of ways in which the notion of conviviality has
been read, applied, or built onto in three overall variants: as the “unruly” culture
and mode of interaction in everyday multiculture (as per Gilroy); as having the
capacities and tools to be at ease with dierence; and as the process of negotiating
minimal sociality in encounters with the other. I will engage with each of these in
turn in order to nd where they succeed and fail, to test them against my empirical
case, and to see how they sit with the concept of politics of coexistence.
e three variants dier by the relation between the normative and the analytical
aspect in each; by where the theoretical conceptualisation locates the ineradicable
acts of boundary-making, conict and groupist othering – are they conviviality’s
other or embraced within it; by the scale at which the notion operates – from that
of the community to the sub-individual level; and nally, by how transferable to
novel contexts, i.e. theoretically universal, each variant is. Despite these varying
theoretical stances of the terms, literature in the convivial turn often elides their
dierences. Many authors cite the entire canon of publications in the convivial
turn, without critically engaging the contrasting arguments therein and declaring
their allegiance with either one or the other incompatible thesis. Here, I will dis-
cuss each interpretation of conviviality separately (and then relate it to the oth-
ers), in order to nd which conceptualisation is methodologically sound and under
what conditions.
Gilroy’s original mobilisation of the notion of conviviality, or convivial culture, is
set against the state discourse on multiculturalism.51 It is framed as a powerful
critique of the latter’s integrationist agenda. He contrasts the idea of a pacied
composite society with the plural identity and “unkempt” and “unruly” practice
in multiculture, which, he insists, has grown in parallel to and despite the state’s
hierarchical and racialised policies and discourses.52
Multiculture is lacking a precise denition, and not just in Gilroy’s book. More of-
ten than not, in publications its meaning is intimated by attaching the term to em-
pirical urban contexts – invariably of British provenance – and simply presenting it
as the patent description of their essence.53 It has been invoked as a more situated
51 Gilroy, Aer Empire; Gilroy, “Colonial Crimes.”
52 ere are parallels in the discussion on Stuart Hall’s “multicultural dri”, by Sophie Watson and
Anamik Saha, “Suburban Dris: Mundane Multiculturalism in Outer London,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 36, no. 12 (2013): 2016–34.
53 For example, in Gilroy, Aer Empire; Les Back and Shamser Sinha, “Multicultural Conviviality in
the Midst of Racism’s Ruins,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 37, no. 5 (2016): 517–32; Suzanne
Hall, City, Street and Citizen: e Measure of the Ordinary, Routledge Advances in Ethnography
(London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Alex Rhys-Taylor, “Coming to Our Senses: A Multi-
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form of “superdiversity”. Superdiversity was recently coined to draw attention to
the rapidly changing population congurations in London and the UK in relation
to intensifying dynamics of global migration ows which, in contrast to immigra-
tion of the 1960s and 1970s, not only entail the movement of people from more
varied national, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds but also an ongoing
diversication of migration channels, dierentiations of legal statuses, diverging
patterns of gender and age, and variance in migrants’ education, work skills and
experience.54
Just like the term superdiversity, “multiculture” is used to point at the multiple
dierences that characterise contemporary urban populations but it centres on
a localised co-presence of dierence rather than on the proliferation of diversi-
ties across migrant ows. e phenomenon of superdiversity means that there are
many more potential identities to be negotiated within the space of the London
neighbourhood.55 Cultural boundaries are imprecise, unstable and blurred as peo-
ple constantly move across and negotiate between cultures and identications,
which might lead to multidirectional processes of hybridity and creolisation. Gidley
writes that his ethnography of an inner London estate revealed “complex family
histories that made multiple identications inevitable: Nigerian and white British
and Jamaican; Ghanaian and Irish; Bajan (from Barbados) and west African.”56 All
this is seen to make older notions of multiculturalism, based on the idea of coexist-
ence of distinct communities, obsolete and the term “multiculture” is mobilised to
replace it. It conveys the sense of the irrevocably multiple nature of culture itself in
these neighbourhoods.
For Gilroy, in the convivial type of culture, inculcated by living in Britain’s everyday
multiculture, racial and ethnic dierences stop presenting insurmountable thresh-
olds to social interaction and become banal and unremarkable. People discover
that there are other dierences between them, such as taste, lifestyle and leisure
preferences, and many commonalities – institutional, generational, educational,
political; all of this undercuts the signicance of race and ethnicity.57 Still, Gilroy
warns that conviviality is not based on the absence of racism, neither implies “the
triumph of tolerance”.58 Conict persists, as in everyday multiculture dierences
have to be negotiated in real time. Convivial culture is rather described as “un-
ruly”. It is the intense interaction of resolving dierence, rather than symbolically
insulating it.
sensory Ethnography of Class and Multiculture in East London” (PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths
College, 2010).
54 Fran Meissner and Steven Vertovec, “Comparing Super-Diversity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38,
no. 4 (2015): 542–43; Steven Vertovec, “Super-Diversity and Its Implications,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1024–54. For a discussion on whether the word is spelled with a hyphen
or without, see Meissner and Vertovec, “Comparing Super-Diversity,” 545.
55 Ben Gidley, “Landscapes of Belonging, Portraits of Life: Researching Everyday Multiculture in an
Inner City Estate,” Identities 20, no. 4 (2013): 363–66.
56 Ibid., 366, emphasis in original.
57 Gilroy, “Multiculture in Times of War,” 40.
58 Gilroy, Aer Empire, xi.
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We can read Gilroy’s notion of conviviality as aimed at a spontaneous production
of togetherness and belonging “from below”, and in opposition to any projects for
indexing and ordering a society, irrespective of whether they involve racist fears,
nationalist ideals or the promotion of diversity. With Gilroy, the concept of “con-
viviality” is present in two registers simultaneously. While it is elevated to a uto-
pian symbol on which to base a political project for re-grounding British society,
it is also a descriptive term establishing a relation to a certain empirical reality.
However, Valluvan reminds us that “convivial multiculture” is not simply naming
everyday practices of multi-ethnic interaction, but instead, highlighting particular
normative habituations that have evolved as their outcome: the ability to evoke dif-
ference whilst avoiding groupist precepts.59
FANTASIES ON URBAN CONTACT
A lot of writing preceding and co-terminous with Gilroy’s invocation of the term
conviviality has celebrated the transformative eect of daily contact with diversity
in the contemporary city (of the Global North, I would add). e pedagogical ef-
fect forced by learning to live with strangers and the emergence of urban civility
is extended to the realm of intercultural and interracial encounter. e small acts
of kindness in the city, and contact more generally, are seen to contribute to the
shedding away of prejudices and the growth of a more cosmopolitan sensibility
and appreciative openness in host populations. is “romanticization of contact”
in the everyday multiculture approach has been heavily criticised by Valentine, and
Valentine and Sadgrove on both empirical and theoretical grounds.60 ey force-
fully argue that positive experiences of encounter in one context need not carry
over beyond that context; that banal everyday contact and informal acts of care or
civility in urban public space do not necessarily equate with respect for dierence;
that individuals can separate their personal conduct from their moral beliefs; and
that morality – the judging of self and others – is not a solely cognitive process and
may be pre-reective.
Matejskova and Leitner point out that even extended contact with the Other need
not be transformative and that the practice of exempting the known individual
from established negative group stereotypes is a well-known phenomenon in so-
cial psychology.61 ey observe that often, in a singular interview, an informant
59 Valluvan, “Conviviality and Multiculture,” 218.
60 Valentine, “Living With Dierence”; Valentine and Sadgrove, “Lived Dierence”; Valentine and
Sadgrove, “Biographical Narratives of Encounter: e Signicance of Mobility and Emplacement
in Shaping Attitudes Towards Dierence,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1979–94.
61 Tatiana Matejskova and Helga Leitner, “Urban Encounters with Dierence: e Contact Hypoth-
esis and Immigrant Integration Projects in Eastern Berlin,” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 7
(2011): 736.
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professed anti-immigrant attitudes in some moments and empathic sensibilities in
others. In this sense, a lot of the work on encounter and multiculture suers from
a one-dimensional concept of the human subject as a vessel of a transparent and
consistent morality and aect.
Gilroy’s concept is somewhat less vulnerable to those charges for two reasons.
Firstly, it includes an understanding of “unruly” negotiation of coexistence that
does not require a disciplined moral worldview and it does not rule out conicts.
Secondly, it stays away from the modernist overtones of theorisation. e notion of
“convivial multiculture” converts a messy reality – whose analytical conceptualisa-
tion in a particular way would be admittedly questionable – into a utopian symbol.
It is the recognition of the symbol that should work to transform the polity (and
rst of all, the intellectual debate), rather than the processes on the ground that the
convivial account might reect well or poorly. In comparison, writings celebrating
the intercultural encounter place the onus of the potential transformation into a
better society on the multitudes; on the supposedly ongoing change in their prac-
tices and moralities. It becomes then far more important to ascertain in methodo-
logically sound ways whether such a change is taking place and what are its scope
and conditions. is perspective is, however, insidious and intellectually compla-
cent in another way: it invites thinking in a typically modernist register about in-
tervening in the conditions that would aord desirable changes among these mul-
titudes, instead of asking us to learn from their practice, as Gilroy’s take does.
I will argue in this paper that although Gilroy’s conviviality preserves its relevance
in the face of critiques on the automatic pedagogic eect of living in multiculture,
the notion has to be restricted to a certain kind of urban spaces and social constel-
lations: to spaces over which no participant group can have a strongly dominant
claim. e unruly equilibrium between conict and reconciliation breaks down
when some of the participants in multiculture are powerful enough to gain access
to the very kind of categorical discursive work that the term conviviality was called
upon to challenge. Since groups located in a national society are typically posi-
tioned at an uneven distance to power and to the use of categories of power, this
has certain implications about the relation between multiculture and class. I will
come back to this later.
IS THE WOMEN’S MARKET A PLACE OF MULTICULTURE?
Gilroy’s conception of conviviality presupposes a certain type of spontaneous dai-
ly interactions, which he terms multiculture. While cities in Bulgaria, along with
those in other South-East European countries, have a long tradition of coexistence
of dierent ethnic and religious groups, it is since the establishment of the modern
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Bulgarian state in the late 19th century that their cultural mosaic has been progres-
sively eroded by national state policy, expulsions and assimilation. Today, Soa ts
the model of the so-called “post-cosmopolitan city”.62 National minorities are ei-
ther unmarked and invisible (Jews, Armenians, Turks, and others), or socially and
spatially segregated so that direct interaction with them for most ethnic Bulgarians
is limited and rare (Roma). Compared to the Western postcolonial metropolis,
Soa has very little experience with immigrants from other cultural regions.
In this context, the Women’s Market stands out. Could we conceptualise it as a
place of everyday multiculture? It is a place where people of dierent national and
cultural origins work, live or shop side by side and encounter each other on a daily
basis. Many long-term immigrants (who arrived in Bulgaria in socialist times and
have Bulgarian citizenship), as well as more recent ones, have opened businesses
here. While since the 1990s many have been engaged in import trade which is not
“visibly dierent” from that of their Bulgarian peers, on a street intersecting the
market, Tsar Simeon, it is shops with Middle Eastern foods, Iraqi and Turkish res-
taurants that dominate. ere are also businesses targeting only non-Bulgarians:
some of the shops, internet clubs and phone booths, places with beds for rent.
e Middle Eastern immigrants are a diverse group in themselves, ranging from
Turkey to Iran and Afghanistan, and as it turns out, even farther aeld:
It was very interesting because in the inner courtyard where I lived then, there
was one person from Pakistan, another from Sri Lanka... e Pakistani had a
watch-making shop. Altogether – a great Babylon! (A young woman, ethnic
Bulgarian, lived near the market in the past.)
At the same time, the area remains part of the Bulgarian majority space despite its
politically charged image as “a ghetto in the centre of the city”, an image actively
promoted by a local group of ethnic Bulgarian residents who fought for the closure
of the marketplace.63 It is visited daily by people from the entire city, and in large
numbers. Some shop in the immigrant businesses – especially the unmarked ones
(one-euro shops, etc.), who often employ Bulgarian Turks and Roma as shop assis-
tants. Most interact with the Roma trading at the market stalls and at the informal
fringes of the marketplace. Some Bulgarians even frequent the evening ea market,
showcasing the day’s crop from the city’s bins.
In the houses surrounding the market, ethnic Bulgarians, most of whom one could
consider as belonging to the re-emerging middle classes today, have been living
there for generations. Assimilated into this resident community are Armenians
and, especially, many Jews – the neighbourhood was the Jewish area of Soa until
1948. e poorer proprietors rent out their dilapidated historic houses to the ethnic
62 Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja, eds., Post-Cosmopolitan Cities: Explorations of Urban
Coexistence (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012).
63 Nikola A. Venkov, “Гражданите и пазарът. Дискурсите на един градски конфликт” [e citi-
zens and the market. Discourses of an urban conict], Critique & Humanism 39 (2012): 139–62.
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Turkish and Roma incomers from the countryside who settle here with their inter-
generational families and establish small communities linked to their home towns.
e Women’s Market neighbourhood can be considered as one of the few truly
ethnically diverse spots in Bulgaria. All these diverse people by necessity encounter
each other. eoretically, an encounter with dierence does not necessarily mean
a handshake, a friendly chat, an exchange. When a Bulgarian walking along Tsar
Simeon St crosses to the opposite side of the street in order to keep a distance from
a group of men whom he identies as “Arabs”, this is also an encounter. e sharing
of a single urban space is not harmonious and not appreciated by everyone. e
Women’s Market has a very polarised image among Soa’s residents and it is the
negative representation which is dominant. In almost every negative account the
resentment towards the market comes from a threatening sense of alien presence
there. e reader can feel the play with this sense of danger and transgression in
the following excerpt from a local consumer-hipster web magazine which promot-
ed the market as a destination of exotic experiences:
Further down the street there is a universal door to “e Other World”. e
Women’s Market. […]
Indeed, it’s very relaxing to take a walk in those parts of town. Use a bit of
imagination and in seconds you’re right in the 1001st night. First, it’s a little
bit scary, as if you’ve just woken up after being kidnapped. You are stand-
ing still and watching a river of ethnic groups ebb and ow past you. But, as
everything that happens here, it’s not dangerous. It’s like swimming – once
you master it, you can do it forever… Let them push you around a couple of
times. Try to make out who’s yelling at whom. Everybody yells at everybody…
You spot a well-dressed auntie on your right. What the hell is she doing here?
Whatever it is, do take several paced breaths to soak up the smell of under-
roasted meatballs [кебапчета].
(“Along the Women’s – to ‘the Other World’”
[По Женския - към “оня свят”],
webcafe.bg, October 26, 2010)
Some of my majority ethnic Bulgarian informants stress that they feel the place as
intimidating especially because there one encounters an undierentiated mess (of
dierence). Some use the word “a population” [население] to denote its occupiers;
others refer to “a Babel of all kinds of people” or “a swarm” [стълпотворение от
най-различни хора, гмеж].
I conclude that what we have at the Women’s Market is indeed akin to multicul-
ture: there are multiple groups and identities that interact with each other daily, in
unruly ways. Even if it is dicult to demonstrate a “cultural creolisation” between
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the groups (as per Gidley),64 we see reected in the outsider perspective that the di-
versity in the market is what jams the sorting and ordering mechanisms needed by
power and the majority society (as per Gilroy). In conceptual opposition to Gilroy’s
bottom-up multiculture one could think of a multi-kulti festival or the presence of
a few establishments with foreign cuisine – a tamed kind of diversity.65
DEFINING SOCIAL MULTICULTURE
However, the sense of overwhelming dierence, of intractable mess, of diuse
threat, which members of the ethnic Bulgarian (and Jewish, and Armenian) mid-
dle class convey in interviews, is not triggered solely or even predominantly by the
presence of foreign immigrants in the area. Relatively, their numbers are sparse,
especially before the refugee wave of 2013. e main contention arises, in fact,
from the likelihood of close contact with the otherwise segregated national minor-
ity of Roma/Gypsies. Further, behind the formulation of this “acceptable” target
of resentment, hides a more general unease about meeting the lower strata of the
Bulgarian countryside (migrating to Soa in search of survival) as well as Soa’s
own poor, who come to the market for its low prices, and some – for the discarded
refuse. ese undesirables include groups for whom as of yet there exists no suit-
able language to eject them from the core of the national body – groups such as
low-wage workers, pensioners, and the poorest (non-Roma) Bulgarians, as well as
alcoholics, the homeless, the mentally ill, or simply people without urbane culture.
We can recognise this unnameable social layer in the magazine excerpt above.
Beyond the rather undierentiated “ow of ethnic groups”, what the author actu-
ally spots while on his quest to exotic realms is the vulgar (and typically Bulgarian)
taste of the masses for cheap meatballs; the uncouth “village culture” of aggres-
sive argument and loud presence; and the well-dressed woman who has no natu-
ral place there. Another article from the same website carries the title “e last
bastion of vulgar peasantry” [Последния бастион на селянията] and features a
photo of several Roma vendors dressed in what might be considered tacky taste
and reacting to the photographer with unacceptable enthusiasm (webcafe.bg,
September 20, 2010).
It is the concentration of intense social dierence laid bare which makes the ma-
jority society feel uneasy about the Women’s Market. Although the notions of
64 Gidley’s understanding of multiculture as a site of casual hybridity and creolised identications
was discussed earlier. It can be seen more generally as a process of dynamic exchange of cultural
forms. At the Women’s Market such an exchange seems to take place between specic groups only.
65 Note that the architectural plan of the market’s redevelopment provided exactly for a “street of
restaurants”, while today, aer driving away many of the market’s people, the market management
is now partnering with organisations oering tours of “the multicultural area of Soa”.
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multiculture, conviviality, everyday multiculturalism and so on are constituted in
relation to encounters across cultural dierence, here I argue that the problematic
of negotiating dierence does not require the meeting of national or ethnic cultures
– a meeting of social strata will suce. In this sense, I claim that multiculture and
the question of the convivial could be extended to every intense spatial concentra-
tion of social heterogeneity. I would call such concentrations social multiculture.
e Women’s Market in Soa is a prime example of social multiculture.
In geography the notion of “encounter” is used to imply an event of contact where a
lack of commonality is assumed or some form of unease is expected to be present.66
is is a situation where pre-existing and automated social scripts are insucient,
and people do not readily know how to act. ey have to deal with dierence and
they proceed to construct and deconstruct it. e intercultural encounter is in
reality an encounter between dierent ways of life, norms of conduct, racialising
practices, and the traces all these leave on bodies. e same holds true for subjects
who have been enculturated in dierentiated social spaces within the same na-
tional society.67
e intercultural encounter triggers fear in both participating sides. While the ra-
cialised immigrant is apprehensive about experiencing incivility and rejection in a
myriad subtle ways,68 the member of the privileged majority is not accustomed to
the revocation of his condence over his automatically appropriate bodily conduct
(suddenly destabilised by such details as whether he should oer his hand for a
handshake to a woman wearing the hijab or not, whether he should avoid looking
her in the eyes or not...). e risk and fear embedded in the inter-class encounter is
not qualitatively dierent: the middle-class would-be shopper at the market nds
the prospect daunting of passing close by the lower-class Roma hawker who is
loitering amid the ow of pedestrians. e latter is identied as someone likely
to not be giving a toss about the middle-class norm of civil inattention in the city,
who could at any moment challenge one’s personal space. e intercultural and
the inter-class encounter are experienced as a threat in analogous ways. Likewise,
groupist boundary-making and stigmatisation operate in a similar logic wheth-
er “improper conduct” is ascribed to skin colour, purported ethnicity or a reied
social divide.
Reactions of rejection to social multiculture seem very much identical to those we
know about cultural diversity:
Honestly, I go there less and less often because with every step I walk past or
bump into hundreds of – are they Gypsies or are they Turks, people brought
from I don’t know which part of Bulgaria but speaking in some dialect. Are
66 Helen F. Wilson, “On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders, and Dierence,” Progress in
Human Geography 41, no. 4 (2017): 454.
67 Valentine and Sadgrove, “Lived Dierence.”
68 Noble, “e Discomfort of Strangers.”
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they Turkish Gypsies or Gypsy Turks I don’t know, but there it’s full with –
from kiddos starting at one or two years old up to elderly people. [...]
Besides, every few meters you’re pestered by a number of women, because
they are selling cigarettes, from your right, and left, and right, and left – it’s
even as if they’re whispering straight into your ear. (Elderly woman, ethnic
Bulgarian, lives not very far from the area, visits the market periodically.)
is account is skilfully dramatised by the narrator, but still, it highlights the felt in-
stability and inadequacy of the categories for classifying and disciplining the Other
not only in relation to ethnicity. e act of othering wavers between ethnicity, lan-
guage (dialect), rural origin, ages, and notions of personal and public space. e
worst of it all for the informant is that all these layers are there mixed together and
inseparable.
CONVIVIALITY AS BEING AT EASE WITH DIFFERENCE
e second understanding of conviviality that I look at emerges in studies trying
to gain insight through ethnographic eldwork into the habituations and practices
that ensure the ability to live with dierence. ey ask what cultural and inter-
personal capacities, intuitions and practices underpin a communal disposition
to multicultural conviviality? How do these capacities evolve, and what material,
structural and spatial aordances permit a convivial process? Exemplary here is
the work of Amanda Wise and collaborators. For them conviviality denotes “af-
fectively at ease relations of coexistence and accommodation.”69 Responding to
Valentine’s critiques, they propose examining “being at ease” as a process, as the
practice of inhabiting multiculture rather than as a xed disposition or ethical im-
perative. Moreover, they recognise that human relations are not unequivocal and
that convivial attitudes and everyday racism are coexisting rather than being mutu-
ally exclusive.70
is perspective has provided many valuable insights, such as the concept “con-
vivial labour” for the sustained if usually unnoticed eort invested in build-
ing “with-ness” and maintaining relationships as convivial.71 It has drawn upon
Bourdieu’s habitus to demonstrate how accommodation to cultural and religious
dierence is trained since early years by the very structural and spatial organisa-
tion of Singaporean society, shaping what the authors have named “an intercul-
tural habitus”. us, they build a much more solid argument than studies which
69 Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism,” 407.
70 Wise and Noble, “Convivialities,” 426–28.
71 Noble, “Everyday Cosmopolitanism”; Wise, “Convivial Labour.”
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see mere “eeting contact” in the city as conducive to convivial pedagogy. And yet,
they nd that while the intercultural habitus ensures a harmonious coexistence
between the established ethnic groups in the Singaporean city-state, this has not
translated into accommodation for new immigrants (remarkably, even if they are
from one’s own transnational ethnic group). is perspective is further troubled
by questions such as, are the intercultural capacities mastered by those who had to
choose a life in multiculture true “convivial openness” and “cosmopolitan sensibil-
ity” or “mere survival skills” in what is felt as a hostile environment?72 What sends
an individual either way?
By framing the research question as nding tools of conviviality (as proposed by
Back and Sinha in a far less processual account73) which empower individuals and
communities in lived multiculture, this strand of work tries to avoid the meth-
odological trap of evaluating those individuals or communities as “being at ease”
with convivial relations or not. e two can coexist and subjects are allowed some
complexity. However, I, along with Lapiņa, argue that by keeping the separation
between convivial and groupist practice signicant conceptually, this approach is
rendered epistemologically awed.74
My eldwork on relations at a street marketplace in Soa shows that articulations
of outspoken racism may exist not just “in parallel” to convivial ones but, para-
doxically, the two can interweave in a very intimate manner (to be discussed in a
bit). Lapiņa explores how residents maintaining a community park in Copenhagen
reect on park users with non-Danish backgrounds. She nds that what might at
rst seem as convivial narratives counterpoised to dominant racialising discourses
cannot be disentangled from the reproduction of implicit norms and inequalities
linked to a hierarchical image of Danish society.75 e small park was described by
her informants as open to and used by everyone but what this talk obscured was
that, in fact, one side welcomed the other and set implicit terms for the encounter
to be seen as “successful” – based on white middle-class majority Danish codes for
what such a social space should look like, what being “cosy” means, etc. us, for
Lapiņa “the convivial”, in the sense of anti-groupist, eectively at-ease relations of
accommodation, was dicult to establish or rule out. Instead, it masked the fact
that relations were already embedded in unequal power structures.
72 Amanda Wise, “Becoming Cosmopolitan: Encountering Dierence in a City of Mobile Labour,”
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 14 (2016): 2289–308.
73 Back and Sinha, “Multicultural Conviviality.”
74 Lapiņa, “Besides Conviviality.”
75 Ibid., 38–39.
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CONVIVIALITY BEYOND THE GLOBAL NORTH?
While Lapiņa had to use a very ne-tuned lens to uncover the exclusionary mecha-
nisms at work in a Danish park, that is much easier beyond the postcolonial cities
of the Global North. If in Copenhagen residents try their best to sincerely believe
in non-discrimination, diversity, human rights, everyone’s equal worth, etc., this is
not equally important in all cultural contexts. Conviviality was invoked by Gilroy
as a counter-discourse to what he saw as an inherently racialising ideology and fee-
ble policies of state-led multiculturalism. Such a starting point tends to disassoci-
ate the interest in bottom-up culture from the inuences of hegemonic discourses
on it and to occlude the role of multiculturalist policy (as well as policies preceding
it) for the possibility to talk at all about convivial multiculture in the UK. I have
already discussed the importance of the national context.
More recently, a number of authors have tried to export the notion of convivial-
ity elsewhere.76 All of them found that they had to qualify it in ways which one
could call paradoxical. In an early study, Vigneswaran nds convivial relations in
Johannesburg “woven into the very fabric of interactions involving the threat of
physical violence and/or criminal victimization.”77 Practices such as engaging in
friendly exchange across radical social dierence, festive dancing, turning a group
activity into play, are revealed as shot through with relations of power and self-in-
terest. Nikolotov talks about a volatile conviviality enacted by immigrant vendors
in the general atmosphere of distrust and ever-pervasive risk of scamming or be-
trayal at a large Moscow market.78 In ongoing play which is sometimes instrumen-
tal, sometimes just for their own amusement, vendors “shift from provocation to
attery and politeness, hostility and threat, care and instrumental calculation, and
back again to joking and play.”79 Chambers conceptualises a performed convivial-
ity taking place in the Muslim neighbourhoods of the Indian city of Saharanpur.80
ere convivial exchanges are found to serve as a way to mask inequality, power and
exploitation. e primary function of intensive conviviality is to maintain strong
social relations between neighbours, relatives and others, yet relations contain
76 Tilmann Heil, “Are Neighbours Alike? Practices of Conviviality in Catalonia and Casamance,”
European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 452–70; Loren B. Landau and Iriann Free-
mantle, “Beggaring Belonging in Africa’s No-Man’s Lands: Diversity, Usufruct and the Ethics of
Accommodation,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42, no. 6 (2016): 933–51; Darshan
Vigneswaran, “Protection and Conviviality: Community Policing in Johannesburg,” European
Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2014): 471–86; and a special issue introduced by Marsden
and Reeves, “Marginal Hubs.”
77 Vigneswaran, “Protection and Conviviality,” 472.
78 Anton Nikolotov, “Volatile Conviviality: Joking Relations in Moscow’s Marginal Marketplace,”
Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (2019): 874–903.
79 Ibid., 876.
80 omas Chambers, “‘Performed Conviviality’: Space, Bordering, and Silence in the City,” Modern
Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (2019): 776–99.
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forms of obligation, instrumentality and economic interests, and sometimes these
tensions erupt into aggression and violence.
ese are seen by researchers as instances of “unruly” living together, which is nei-
ther harmonious and “sweetly reasonable” nor breaks down into dystopia.81 In all
these contexts, tactics of subverting and, at the same time, constructing social hi-
erarchies are in plain view. Moreover, both are undertaken to one’s own advantage.
e choice of action is found to be based on self-interest and instrumental ethics.
One could argue that such instrumentalising accounts omit as a factor a signicant
human need that drives social interaction: simply securing sociality with other hu-
mans, obtaining a however minimal degree of sympathy, psychological relief, mo-
ments of support, and so on. Acting on this need, however, is also acting on a type
of “self-interest”.
e argument about a performativity of convivial practice which is more clearly
visible beyond the Global North is further supported by a comparative study of
modalities of accommodating dierence in Africa’s rapidly expanding urban pe-
ripheries.82 In Nairobi the authors nd that while residents embrace an explicit
discourse of “cosmo conviviality” which makes all arrivals welcome, the practice is
rooted in utility. It is based on seeing urban space as a site of extraction of resources
rather than as a place of belonging. In Johannesburg a “mind your own business”
modality has emerged that allows for multiple parallel and often contradictory eth-
ics of coexistence. Importantly for the discussion here,
tolerance towards the Other is rarely motivated by a principled stance to-
wards aecting a permanent, binding and universal order, but determined by
a situated assessment of how best to serve one’s own trajectories and goals
under precarious living conditions.83
To sum up, what the researcher sees as a convivial practice may look like a dedicat-
ed and consistent eort of accommodating dierence but is not necessarily such. If
convivial acts emerge in the rst place as a tool to negotiate one’s position in highly
situational, unequal, informal, and contingent relations, then conviviality is bound
to be “volatile”.
Perhaps, one could still be asking research questions such as: when are “convivial
tools” employed in the struggle for a better positioning in the mixed urban soci-
ety; what work do they do; and could one think of arrangements where convivial
practices, even if only as a self-interested choice, would still be a means to foster
peaceful resolution of tensions in the place of conict? Masking the conict of
interests seems to be one of the functions of performed conviviality in the Muslim
81 Marsden and Reeves, “Marginal Hubs,” 758.
82 Landau and Freemantle, “Beggaring Belonging.”
83 Ibid., 943.
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communities of Saharanpur. e author further notes the role of silence among
the dominated groups for maintaining a (performed) convivial relation with the
dominant Hindu.84 In South Africa, Vigneswaran sees convivial performance as a
palliative during encounters across stark divides of privilege that are pregnant with
danger of violence. However, he is asking also “if these instances of conviviality
are undergirded by mutual suspicion and vulnerability, then can we say that con-
viviality helps cope with dierence and/or stymie the potential for intercommu-
nal violence”?85 Aren’t conviviality and violence co-constitutive or at least deeply
intertwined?86
All the reviewed authors working beyond the Global North agree that the acts
of construction and disruption of excluding categories are dicult or impossible
to disentangle. is puts into question at a deeper level the program of Wise and
collaborators to map out “tools of conviviality” as distinct from other tactics and
capacities mobilised to deal with an encounter, with the Other.
Concluding this review, I would like to insist on the primacy of politics. By this I
understand the complicated interest-based action, always positioned, i.e., deter-
mined by the historical location of the subject in a social and discursive landscape.
When the subject acts, needs for having a moral self-conception, attaining con-
sistent ethics, or even the desire for outer projection of a socially valued morality
are all just one group of motivating aspirations among others. A methodological
perspective which is centred on the convivial sets them apart from other needs and
aspirations and unduly inates their role. Such a perspective will eventually reach
the conclusion that everyday racism and conviviality – the construction and dis-
ruption of excluding categories – are impossible to disentangle. Indeed, one of the
authors above is compelled to suggest that we should “think of conict, othering,
and violence as not occurring in parallel to or alongside conviviality, but rather as
constituting part of the same (dis-)continuum, undialectically, but rhizomatically.”87
However, I believe that such a course should alert us to recognise that, simply, “the
convivial” cannot be the organising principle of analysis. What we are interested in
is the politics of the social interaction, and “the convivial” should take its modest
place as a non-theoretical term for a descriptive, if normatively valuable, aspect of
that complex phenomenon.
Finally, the insight that action towards dierence may be primarily based on in-
strumental ethics is worth applying to those research contexts where appreciating
diversity and maintaining non-hierarchical relations is symbolically rewarded at
the same time as there is less pressure to advance at the expense of immediate oth-
ers. For example, the welcoming attitude of Lapiņa’s Danish park users could be
motivated by an interest in constructing a likeable image not only for the purposes
84 Chambers, “‘Performed Conviviality’,” 797–98.
85 Vigneswaran, “Protection and Conviviality,” 477.
86 Ibid., 472.
87 Nikolotov, “Volatile Conviviality,” 877.
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of presenting themselves to outsiders, for example, during the research interview,
but also as internalised self-understanding which emerges as a satisfying one in
response to positively-rewarding Danish discourses. In fact, research on ethical
cosmopolitanism (as opposed to instrumental cosmopolitanism) shows that even
people who have chosen to work or volunteer in occupations that involve a high
degree of intercultural engagements, and who we would expect are profession-
ally devoted to purifying their ethical practice, upon closer inspection turn out to
be “shift[ing] schemes of reasoning, switch[ing] from being closed to open, tol-
erant to intolerant, altruistic to calculating, and so on” in order to full diverse
human needs.88
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE I: CONVIVIALITY AND RACISM
My eldwork on relations at the Women’s Market in Soa, located in an “anti-
diversity hegemony”, conrms that articulations of outspoken racism may exist not
just “in parallel” to convivial ones but, paradoxically, the two can interweave in a
very dense and “rhizomatic” manner. I will demonstrate the methodological dif-
culties that arise through the following vignette.
Hrista is a woman around 45–50 years old, from the white ethnic Bulgarian major-
ity, from a provincial small town, who migrated many years ago to Soa to start
a higher education degree but the post-socialist crisis sent her instead to work
at the market. She got married to an entrepreneurial Bulgarian peasant who had
started various small businesses at the market. Now she runs a small kiosk for
foods and drinks. She employs a middle-aged Roma woman to take shifts as a ven-
dor while Hrista is securing the stocks. In the busiest hours both work in tan-
dem. Over the years, Hrista and her husband had saved some money (they had
a few business failures as well) and bought cheaply one of the old houses in the
immediate neighbourhood. us, they settled permanently among many provin-
cial Roma and Turkish families who also hold stalls at the market and rent in the
dilapidated pre-war properties around it. Often Hrista’s family would pay some of
the poorer neighbours’ kids to carry wood for the stove and thus help them nan-
cially (or, alternatively, we could argue – to exploit them). She doesn’t particularly
“like” the Roma but unlike many ethnic Bulgarians in Soa she communicates daily
with them. She shares some codes of communication, possibly inherited from her
“lower-class” provincial origin, which make that communication smoother – such
as speaking directly and without civilities, speaking loudly and insistently, using
88 Nina Høy-Petersen and Ian Woodward, “Working with Dierence: Cognitive Schemas, Ethical
Cosmopolitanism and Negotiating Cultural Diversity,” International Sociology 33, no. 6 (2018):
669.
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colourful little stories to relate a point. She recently oered to support one of the
Roma youngsters if he was willing to complete his school education. She tells me
that years ago she took care of two other Roma boys from a failed family and man-
aged “to raise them as decent people”.
All this looks like an example of convivial relations across race and social class:
an “unruly” and not without conicts, but multilayered interaction (the above de-
scription, in fact, does not do justice to the manifold layers). Hrista’s actions and
relations established over the years seem to be working against the hegemonic
boundaries, as commonalities of residence, work and social trajectory come into
eect. Let’s see, however, how Hrista herself formulated the above account. I ran
into her one evening as she was coming home from work and shopping:
Wazzup! Have you written some new interesting things about our life here?
[When I respond that I’ve been organising a volunteer initiative to work with
the Roma kids, she becomes agitated and starts to lecture me how it is point-
less to try to “assimilate the Gypsies”:]
Once upon a time I too came from the provinces, with such big stars in my
eyes! No, no, in ten years you’ll also be encountering such young people with
ideals and will be trying to dissuade them.
Every kid is [born] good! But by the age of seven turns into a callous Gypsy!
It’s not possible [to be otherwise] – the milieu produces them in this way, they
can’t get out of their milieu.
Here you go: one little Gypsy – it has completed elementary school. I told it:
I’ll pay for your notebooks and textbooks if you go and enrol in the evening
school over there. Its mother turns up [and asks me]: “Will they give us child
benets then?” “ey’ll give you, why not.” I give the boy ve leva. e next
day he tells me, “Ol’ sister, yesterday I bought bread and cheese to feed my six
brothers ’cos we’re many and hungry. Give me [some money] again, this time
I’ll buy notebooks!” I gave him and waited for him to come back with note-
books. Nothing of the sort!
In the evening he rang my doorbell – asking for another two leva to buy some
sausage [for the family]. So that’s what I’m telling you – if you give them a n-
ger, they’ll take more and more until they’ve taken your whole arm!
And his mother! She’s rolled out six of them – and walks around with the sev-
enth! He either has to steal something or go and look for something [to collect
and recycle]. ey constantly call at our place – to ask to carry our wood for
us. Because we use a woodstove.
So, at the age of ten he [the “Gypsy” in general] stops studying – [just] because
so do his friends. At thirteen he gets married – because by then he’s keen on
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making little Gypsos. en he has to go around and search for ways to feed
them. What kind of education and what kind of study do you expect, given
this state of aairs?
Right, we brought up two Gypsies since they were little. And we’ve had suc-
cess insofar as they didn’t take to the bottle or become drug addicts! eir
father killed a man [and was sent to prison] and their mother couldn’t manage
on her own. So they were constantly in our café which we had then – they
cleaned the tables, looked after the fruit trees. Now they call me “mum”. ey
have a shop up at the end over there – they are selling at the market. ey are
all here, one’s gotten married, the other hasn’t yet.
(Middle-aged woman, ethnic Bulgarian,
trader renting a kiosk at the market, lives nearby.)
Some months later I met Hrista while I was with a young friend of mine from the
volunteer initiative for Roma kids, a very responsible boy of fourteen with many
brothers and sisters; from a family suering from multiple issues. He greeted her
with deference and I realised this was the same boy she was talking about.
e above account shows that despite habitually interacting across racialised class
boundaries which most other ethnic Bulgarians won’t even come near to, Hrista
operates with a very stable notion of hierarchy. It is clear for her that “Gypsies”
should be “assimilated” by the ethnic Bulgarian culture as a path of “civilising”
them into a decent way of life. Despite knowing personally many Roma individuals
who are dierent from each other and even trusting some with responsible work
in her business, she wields a solid model of folk sociology to explain “the peculiar
nature” of the “Gypsy” (as well as the existence of exceptions; the model is no doubt
changing in time in order to accommodate contradicting evidence, as does any
other discursive system). Hrista seems to be “at ease with dierence” in the sense
of a resourceful and creative practice of navigating the social multiculture she is
thrown into, but at the same time she remains adamantly critical of this coexist-
ence, erecting boundaries rather than dissolving them.
We could try to delineate tools and acts of conviviality in her life-story; to deter-
mine which of her capacities or views enabled her to look after the orphaned boys
in her café or made her volunteer to urge my friend to continue his education?
However, we might nd that in no small measure these “convivial” acts were driven
by a pull to arm her own social position of dominance and enact a superiority
of the values and culture of the groups she identies with. Certainly this was one
of the messages that were addressed to me when she recounted her experiences.
In the moments when she undertook those acts, probably those pulls were mixed
with human compassion, socially conditioned understanding of what is right, de-
sire to full inculcated notions of being helpful and generous, appreciation of the
benets that those relations brought (not only economic but also in aective sat-
isfaction from respect and gratitude), notions of traditional forms of tutelage she
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knew from her childhood in a small town, and so on. What I insist on is that the
contingent dynamics of this heterogeneous assemblage of socially positioned mo-
tives is best conceptualised as micropolitics of action – in this case, the politics of
coexistence with the other in social multiculture.
Moreover, it is likely that Hrista can recount these experiences in a very dierent
light, emphasising entirely dierent messages. e research has to keep in mind
that in the account above, the politics of the moment of our meeting (how she po-
sitions me, how she temporarily positions herself, what are the points she wants to
impress – some explicit, others not evident even to her – all this endlessly rich dy-
namics that poststructuralist discourse analysis would try to reconstruct from the
way facts are framed and some are given prominence by being detached from an
always overowing and messy reality) are inseparable from the politics of Hrista’s
actions in the past (the dynamics of being positioned and tactically positioning
herself along multiple dimensions of the social landscape) and from the politics of
her memory (the contingent reconstruction of a self from the accumulated pile of
contradictory actions, motives, emotions – some poignantly remembered, some
invented later, some forgotten and sought anew).
Recourse to the perspective of convivial tools impoverishes this complexity from
an analytical point of view. Still, such an analysis has its own legitimate politics of
transforming this amorphous complexity into two types of layers: of commend-
able dissolution of some boundaries and of reprehensible hardening of others. e
convivial perspective is worthwhile for the normative work it can do by drawing
attention to those aspects of the protean reality that can serve to reroute the elite
debates on dierence and managing the social.
CONVIVIALITY AS MINIMAL CONSENSUS
More recently, there is a third operationalisation of conviviality in the literature.
Starting o from a comparative study of how understandings of “good neighbourli-
ness” evolve from Senegal to Catalonia as Senegalese migrants move between the
two contexts, Heil89 is looking to construe the notion in a way that will not run into
such methodological contradictions as the conception of Wise and collaborators.
He aims to shed away the normative aspect from the term and to turn it into a
purely analytical research tool.90 He preserves from Gilroy a focus on the everyday
89 Heil, “Are Neighbours Alike?”
90 Tilmann Heil, “Conviviality. (Re-)negotiating Minimal Consensus,” in Routledge International
Handbook of Diversity Studies, ed. Steven Vertovec (London and New York: Routledge, 2014),
317–24; Magdalena Nowicka and Tilmann Heil, “On the Analytical and Normative Dimensions
of Conviviality and Cosmopolitanism” (lecture, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany,
June 15, 2015), 1–20.
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and a conceptual opposition to the homogenising and cleansing tendencies that
are rife in political discourses on belonging and citizenship. On the other hand, he
distances the notion from the vision that in an environment of superdiversity cul-
tural dierences would become ordinary and unremarkable, especially since, as he
reminds us, they are typically compounded by inequality and power asymmetries.
Instead, Heil insists on the fragility and precariousness of negotiating dierence.
erefore he states that “tension, conict and frustration” should equally be a part
of the conceptual notion of conviviality, along with “the situations of consensus,
consideration and respect.”91 e leading research question is, how do people con-
struct “minimal, yet sucient” sociality across sustained dierence? Conviviality
in this variant directs the researcher’s attention not to dierence becoming unre-
markable (it does not), but to the frequently unremarkable social practices with
which people engage in order to try to mitigate the inherent uncertainty and risk of
encounters with cultural and social dierence. As an illustration, Heil discusses the
complexity surrounding practices of greeting or avoidance when neighbours and/
or strangers meet in neutral space.92
For Nowicka and Heil the term conviviality should encompass only the eeting
and the minimal: those social phenomena which are “in-between, rather quiet, and
which are both more or less peaceful and more or less conictual.”93 e authors
insist that there is more to analysis of human relations than what more structural
theories look for. ey point out that people with conicting attitudes and identi-
ties, or occupying dierential positions in social structures, are still able to main-
tain relations in everyday situations. Conversely, even routine, rule-guided behav-
iour can break down at any point of the social process. is means that people are
always prepared to respond to new social constellations arising.94 Conviviality is
that which takes place when breakdown is avoided or mended.
By limiting the research object to the micro-tactics of interaction, by keeping dif-
ference as pre-given and objective (rather than constructed in the relation), and by
locating tactics such as avoidance, imposition and othering within the purview of
the concept on a par with those of cooperation and respect, Heil is able to set up a
purely analytical frame. He escapes the dichotomy between “convivial” boundary-
dissolution and “bad” boundary-making by locating both types of action within
conviviality. Being theoretically well-posed, the concept is able to travel to Senegal,
Catalonia, and, presumably, any other cultural context.
e cost of this success is high, however, since the object of study is restricted
to a very specic aspect of social interaction: conviviality becomes “the (re)ne-
gotiation of minimal consensus” across dierence.95 An ethnographic focus on
the everyday production of minimal consensuses, beneting from the traditions
91 Heil, “Conviviality,” 317.
92 Ibid., 322–23.
93 Nowicka and Heil, “Analytical and Normative Dimensions,” 13.
94 Ibid.
95 Heil, “Conviviality.”
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of ethnomethodology and studies of urban civility, is important in its own right.
However, every minimal consensus is played out as a part of larger consensuses
and dissensuses. Although Heil recognises the presence of power asymmetry, ine-
quality and hierarchy, they are bracketed into a pre-set and static background. is
variant of conviviality provides the clearest testimony supporting my claim that the
convivial turn does not reach farther than an interest in the mere techniques for
living together.
ETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTE II: THE FAILED CONVIVIAL ACT
e northern end of the Women’s Market in Soa is capped by an ugly 1990s of-
ce building, left from a previous attempt at its redevelopment. I nd this the least
pleasant place. Here pedestrians have to go around past the side of the building to
an opening exposed to the noise and fumes generated by the speeding cars on an
enormous and busy six-lane boulevard. e pedestrian space then compacts into a
very tight sidewalk that leads to a major intersection and is lled with people try-
ing to get to and from the various bus stops while a few “illegal” standing traders
try to sell them socks, candles, and what not. Back at the pedestrian opening a few
24-hour kiosks sell owers and bouquets, rather expensively. Here is also a good
place for the sellers of untaxed, “illegal” cigarettes. ey loiter amid the passers-by
and whisper to everyone, in not so hushed voices, “tsigari, tsigari”. In this specic
zone, the cigarette-sellers tend to be predominantly male, around 35–45 years old.
One autumn evening in 2012, I saw there a beggar kneeling on the ground, of the
type that have a blood-stained bandage, or an appallingly looking open wound on
their leg, and crutches. He was a man of around 30, and the average local would
probably identify him as a “Gypsy”. I will use here the racial codes that would be
employed by the participants in the scene that I am going to describe.
I remember thinking that one can see many very poor people at this market, but it
is rare to see someone begging. I had never seen around here this particular type
of most wretchedly-looking beggar – they would usually be found near the central
hub of the underground. As I was coming nearer, the three or four men who were
selling cigarettes a few paces apart from each other got agitated. A Soa resident
would label them “Gypsies” too, and in fact it is the cigarette-sellers who are cited
by shoppers as the most unpleasant and scary feature at the Women’s Market. e
men at this end are also rumoured to be more aggressive and likely to cheat cus-
tomers by selling them multipacks lled with polystyrene. Cigarette-sellers are not
a hierarchical group, however; rather, they are semi-independent “retailers”.
As I watched, the men went over to the beggar and started violently kicking him
and shouting (in Bulgarian rather than in their language, Turkish):
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Crook! Why are you lying to people! Scram away! Heard what I said?!
Ha, look how nicely he walks now! [as the man tried to get up and limp away.]
Scram!
e dozens of (ethnic Bulgarian) passers-by were stunned by the sudden show of
aggression and stopped in their tracks, hands full of bags of vegetables, watch-
ing the scene. ey were in a dilemma whether to intervene, and confused about
which side to defend. For both sides in the confrontation broke essential norms of
urban civility: one was recognised as a (fraud) Gypsy beggar and the other as Gypsy
contraband dealers, violently beating up a person in a public place. A middle-aged
woman and, separately, an elderly man took the side of the victim and confronted
the attackers with shouts of their own:
Why are you beating the man? What has he done to you! Let go!
e attackers, who by that moment were enjoying their success at publicly humili-
ating the beggar (as they saw it), were surprised by the reaction of the audience and
responded with threatening postures towards the intervening ethnic Bulgarians
and by hurling back abuse in the broad sense of “Who are you to tell me what to
do!” However, I would like to interpret their initial action of attacking the beggar
as convivial.
According to Heil, conviviality is about making a situated eort for building a rela-
tion with the other. Everyone in the scene I described was aware of the established
social hierarchy: the begging fraudster was perceived as preying concretely on the
ethnic Bulgarian market visitors; the cigarette-sellers knew, too, about their racial-
ised image as fraudsters and good-for-nothings. I argue that their agitation was a
determined attempt to overcome the latter image by showing care for the ethnic
Bulgarian shoppers. ey construed themselves and the ethnic Bulgarians as mem-
bers of one fellowship, that of the regular users of the market space, whose pros-
perity was threatened by an outsider fraud. By volunteering a civic engagement
(unexpected from a “Gypsy”) in the otherwise anonymous space of the street, they
demonstrated their accession to the ethnic Bulgarian norms. It was a risky move,
also a violent one, but it was aimed at receiving the respect and approval of those
present and at creating a momentary convivial community across the racial and
class divide.
Unfortunately, the class divide inescapably shone through. e correct course of ac-
tion in their own milieu – the stronger one stepping forth and viciously punishing
and humiliating those who preyed on the weaker ones – here backred as it broke
other norms in which those men were not well-versed. us, they found them-
selves once again in the situation of being reproached by members of the culturally
dominant class and ethnic group. From there they lapsed into the well-rehearsed
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mode of seeking to counteract through rudeness and physical threat what they ex-
perienced as unjust but too-rened-to-handle domination by the ethnic Bulgarian
opponent. In this way, racialised boundaries were rearmed despite the best ef-
forts of those involved to build bridges. e failure had been set up long before the
actual situation played out; it was programmed by the social trajectories available
to the participants ever since they were born. is kind of failed minimal consensus
is what Heil’s notion of conviviality is not able to handle analytically because he iso-
lates only the micro-scale of the interaction. A politics of coexistence framework,
on the other hand, is prepared to recognise that the parties seeking a common
sociality may live in so very dierent worlds that avoiding conict is impossible.
INTRODUCING SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
To keep the interpersonal encounter embedded in all the relevant contexts, one needs
a multi-level perspective that keeps into view the near and the far, as well as makes a
recourse to more universal sociological theories of the social. Unlike the terms from
geography which I have reviewed so far, the notion politics of coexistence aims not
just to delineate a desired perspective towards a research object, that is, to be “a sen-
sitising frame”;96 rather, it is foreseen as a full-edged theoretical toolbox integrating
two major theories of the social in a methodology for analysis. These are the theory of
practice of Pierre Bourdieu97 and the post-foundational discourse theory (hence
PDT) of Ernesto Laclau and the Essex School in Discourse Analysis.98
The various, always partial and impermanent, orderings of the world can be concep-
tualised as discourses. They are dynamic, partially structured and relational systems
of meaning that are shared, malleable and imbued with power. They organise every-
one’s worldviews, values and identity. PDT prescribes the fundamental mechanics of
a social reality founded on relational discourses. It does so in a way that diers some-
what from the better known Foucauldian approach. Importantly, in PDT discourse is
96 Wise and Noble, “Convivialities,” 425, 428.
97 Pierre Bourdieu, e Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1990); Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Ad-
amson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the eory of Action,
trans. Randall Johnson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Loc Wacquant, “Putting
Habitus in Its Place: Rejoinder to the Symposium,” Body & Society 20, no. 2 (2014): 118–39.
98 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moue, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Demo-
cratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Verso Books, 2001); Jason Glynos and David
Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political eory, Routledge Innovations in
Political eory (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); David Howarth and Yannis Stavraka-
kis, “Introducing Discourse eory and Political Analysis,” in Discourse eory and Political
Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies, and Social Change, ed. David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval, and
Yannis Stavrakakis (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1–23; Tomas
Marttila, “Post-Foundational Discourse Analysis: A Suggestion for a Research Program,” Forum
Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 16, no. 3 (2015), http://dx.doi.
org/10.17169/fqs-16.3.2282.
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symbolic and material at the same time, practice being just another type of discursive
articulation. It is also always political and imbued with power, as it xes the social
world in a given way, supplying it with identities and meanings; it draws boundaries
of usual and strange, own and foreign.
The founding of any new relations of meaning – what is called articulation – is always
contingent and cannot be completely derived (for otherwise it will already be part of
the relational system of meanings) and it aects the entire system. An encounter with
novel elements requires that they be articulated by the discourse (that is, explained
in its terms), for if discrepant meanings remain then the entire system is under threat
as inadequate. Hegemony is the movement to banish that discrepancy and potential
instability; to x the meanings of all elements into a universal system. This goal is,
however, never attainable. Still, hegemony smoothes the social and makes identi-
ties convincing by covering over their fundamental contingency and instability. If the
discrepant elements cannot be incorporated by the system without triggering a cri-
sis, then an antagonistic frontier might be mobilised instead. It establishes symbolic
equivalences between the elements external to the discourse, constituting them all into
a threatening Other that cannot be accepted into the system of relations.
In my approach to discourse theory I shift focus from discourse as the constitutive
agent to the subjects that incorporate it, as beings with their own history and embed-
dedness in structured relations. The urban co-inhabitants are placed in a structured
but dynamic hierarchy of power which is suitable for modelling through Bourdieu’s
theory of practice. The history of their trajectories across social structures has become
incorporated in their thoughts and bodies and that becomes manifest in their inter-
ests, values, ways of speaking, even bodily bearing. Bourdieu names this mechanism
habitus; it is the resource that orients all actions, thoughts and aects of the social
actors. Elsewhere I have shown that Bourdieu’s theory is compatible with a PDT
grounding and makes possible a discursive understanding of habitus, capitals and eld
interactions.99
The politics of coexistence is contingently decided upon by the interaction between
these embodied dispositions of actors and historical discursive projects and identities.
They are, however, always in ux themselves, undergoing contingent re-articulations
in order to keep up with and domesticate the challenges that the social throws at them.
Next, I describe how this rather abstract theoretical apparatus can be tied to the study
of encounter with dierence.
99 Venkov, “Джентрификация на Женския пазар,” 123–46.
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POLITICS OF COEXISTENCE
e framework of politics of coexistence improves on the issues I outlined around
conviviality because its object of study is the encounter with dierence fully em-
bedded in its social determinants and it does not lose sight of history, power and
inequality. It enables us to understand living-together as a contested terrain where
both conict and solidarity are possible and not mutually exclusive. ey are not
seen as fundamentally dierent analytical phenomena but as tactical moves.
e intercultural encounter is modelled as the interaction between discursive sys-
tems in post-foundational discourse theory (PDT), which were until that moment
(partially) isolated. ey were thus able to stabilise dierential hegemonic values,
norms, worldviews, perceptions.100 In the encounter the dierent discursive sys-
tems are confronted and the hegemonic hold of each over the subject is challenged.
Subjects have shaped their identities and ways within those separate hegemonic
elds, with corresponding to them habituses. When discursive systems “meet”,
subjects are forced to react.
In Gilroy’s perspective subjects nd a solution to the crisis through creative ex-
change, mixing and hybridisation of discursive patterns (cultural forms) in the un-
ruly convivial culture. PDT is sympathetic to such a perspective: this is in essence
the case of mutual articulation and hegemonisation of discourses, which is by na-
ture contingent (creative). However, Gilroy does not propose a theory of the sub-
ject and what drives her during this process. From PDT we know that it is possible,
for example, that a destabilised discursive hegemony may respond by solidifying an
antagonistic frontier.
For Heil the fundamental motivation of agents in the encounter is to avoid risk of
conict and of being challenged. PDT complicates this logic: the universal drive of
the subject is to attain or preserve an unproblematic, secure identity. In an encoun-
ter with the articulations of another discursive system this might entail readiness
to embrace change or quite the opposite, depending on other dynamics.
A politics of coexistence methodology recognises the primacy of politics. It un-
derstands that every subject, or if we prefer, body, is located in a complex terrain,
crisscrossed by antagonisms and lines of identication, by recognitions and mis-
matches. Moreover, the subject is a part of that texture, there being no special site
of autonomy “inside” a subject. is means that the subject’s morality and ethics
are always already supplied from somewhere else (and at the same time, contin-
gently re-articulated at the location of the subject). What makes the subject is the
100 Cf. Valentine and Sadgrove, “Lived Dierence”; Valentine and Sadgrove, “Biographical Narra-
tives.”
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CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 11
drive to secure an inner and outer consistency. e quest for consistency and full-
ness is what might make, for example, certain moralities sought after or repudiat-
ed, as they t various historically (discursively) formed expectations by the subject
herself and by her social peers.
While politics of coexistence makes full use of more relational theories, it refocuses
them, in line with the everyday multiculture approach, to the microsociological
terrain. e greatest contribution of the debate we followed here, in my view, is
the turn to the mundane and to the ethnographic method. Central to the everyday
multiculture approach is “the methodological insistence on ethnographic work”,
examining “togetherness as lived negotiation, belonging as practice”, in order to
“stress the situated nature of these practices.”101 e authors further claim that while
critical studies of conict and race expectedly produce accounts on how relations
of power are reproduced, “those working on questions of everydayness, on the
other hand, often begin with a more open-ended approach and inevitably a more
complex picture emerges.”102 Indeed, most work on multiculture starts o from
the encounter with dierence and this makes research more sensitive than more
structural approaches to the element of contingency and undecidability which is
inherent in the encounter. Social distinctions are determined and negotiated on
the spot and, to one or another degree, improvised in the moment. Encounters
exceed the boundary of every reied identity and remind us of the contingent na-
ture of identications and belonging.103 Gilroy’s conviviality calls for an alternative
understanding of culture that focuses on what people do every day rather than
reducing them to their cultural origins:
Culture is misunderstood and oversimplied through being conceived as
ethnic property to be owned and held under copyright. e vital alterna-
tive comprehends unruly, convivial multiculture as a sort of ‘Open Source’
co-production.104
However, dissociating a phenomenology of interpersonal contact from the larger
forces and goals at play in social interaction risks sliding research in everyday mul-
ticulture into a post-political perspective (as Wise and Velayutham are ready to
agree105). Politics of coexistence analysis starts o from the event of the encounter,
but it does not remain there.
Relying on fundamental sociological theory brings back into the picture also pow-
er and inequality, not just as a social backdrop that inuences encounters but as
objects that are consciously or subconsciously struggled over in the interactions.
PDT helps us keep in view that the contestation or acquiescence in even the most
101 Wise and Noble, “Convivialities,” 426; emphasis in original.
102 Ibid., 424.
103 Wilson, “On Geography and Encounter,” 455.
104 Gilroy, “Multiculture in Times of War,” 43.
105 Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism,” 425.
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eeting encounter is political in nature since it is also a contestation about the
larger categories of meaning to which the subjects’ identities are related. Politics of
coexistence is a re-conceptualisation of the research object: from looking at “tech-
niques” for living together, to the politics of living together.
DISCUSSION: BROADENING THE PERSPECTIVE
e convivial turn has been brought about by a normative-political interest in
the capacity of communities, societies and individuals to deal with spatially com-
pressed cultural dierence. Politics of coexistence, in contrast, starts from basic
theory about social relations and the human subject and then works its way to
questions of cross-cultural coexistence. is allows a more open perspective to-
wards aspects of the social exchange that have been overlooked so far. I will con-
clude this paper by drawing attention to two of these: national context and class.
Class dierence has for a long time been a blind spot in studies of how encoun-
ters are negotiated.106 While exploring the cosmopolitanism of Odessa in the 19th
century, Caroline Humphrey remarks that “mutually friendly relations between
a landlord and his poverty-stricken tenant are usually not called ‘cosmopolitan’,
even though the dierence in culture may be greater than that between, for exam-
ple, a Polish and a Greek merchant.”107 I hope that advancing the notion of social
multiculture will help to widen the horizon of interest in the everyday multicul-
ture literature.
Martin Lundsteen has shown that social conicts over inequalities and power, and
over resources and opportunities becoming scarcer, tend to be re-interpreted as
merely cultural conicts as a result of a hegemonic ideological displacement.108
e academic debate on multiculture has not been able to escape this trap either
and might be contributing to its perpetuation. While the politics of coexistence
paradigm, as it was introduced here, still centres around the local negotiation of
dierence, it recognises that along with norms, lifestyles and worldviews, people
are driven also by self-interest and by the entire gamut of play around position-
takings and claiming of capitals which Bourdieu analyses in his theory of prac-
tice. Importantly, this paradigm widens the focus of researchers to include the very
mechanism of transforming socioeconomic inequalities and power dierentials
into sociocultural dierences, such as dierential norms, lifestyles and worldviews.
106 But see a short list of literature in Wilson “On Geography and Encounter,” 454.
107 Caroline Humphrey, “Odessa: Pogroms in a Cosmopolitan City,” in Humphrey and Skvirskaja,
Post-Cosmopolitan Cities, 45.
108 Martin Lundsteen, “Conicts and Convivencia: An Ethnography of the Social Eects of ‘e Cri-
sis’ in a Small Catalan Town” (PhD dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona, 2015).
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CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 11
In another aspect of attention to class, politics of coexistence analysis permits us to
realise that convivial openness to dierence is class-dependent. Not in the straight-
forward claim of “working class is more racist, middle class is more tolerant”
brought by quantitative studies,109 but by realising that there are multiple collective
dierences in terms of “tools of conviviality”. For example, there are dierent kinds
of “grammars of civility” members of dierent social strata might have access to;
dierent kinds of dierence that irk them; dierent skills at hiding nationally unac-
ceptable dispositions they might nevertheless share; as well as dierent inculcated
privileges, relations to space, relations to obligations of citizenship.
Ultimately, class is just a prosthetic aid in this discussion: we are looking at group-
ings in society that are shaped by dierent social experience and locally hegemonic
discourses – by habituations shared within regions of social space. is can be
far more dynamic and complex than a vocabulary of class allows. Socioeconomic
conditions do retain a degree of explanatory power but the politics of coexistence
perspective shows that it is milieus that matter (what I have called elsewhere “dis-
course-social elds”110).
From heterogeneity within a society of how encounters with dierence are dealt
with, I now move to heterogeneity between societies. Most of the debate in the eve-
ryday multiculture approach has taken place localised in a few national contexts,
which also happen to take up the pole of “the centre” in wider centre-periphery re-
lations in academia. us, the impact of the national context (or what we might call
a “national culture”) on the forms and contents of the sought-after phenomenon
of conviviality has been occluded from view. is has permitted research claims to
quietly attain universalistic connotations even if every individual study is present-
ed as local. e debate has been conducted over a universal notion rather than over
“Australian conviviality” or “British conviviality”. Cornered in this way, peripheral
societies have had to contend with “peculiar deformations” of a universal concept,
making apparent not so much that categories of the centre are failing but that once
again peripheries have failed to live up to the categories created by the centre.
Here publications on Catalonia111 and Singapore112 are notable and commendable
exceptions (work on Catalonia has even succeeded in making recognised a sepa-
rate theoretical term – convivència). is is so possibly because those countries’
policies on integration are very forcefully developed, and quite probably, because
those societies belong more to the centre than to the periphery: having strong for-
mal institutions and policy-making, as well as a relatively tame and regulated so-
cial conict.
109 See discussion in James Forrest and Kevin Dunn, “Constructing Racism in Sydney, Australia’s
Largest Ethnicity,” Urban Studies 44, no. 4 (2007): 699–721.
110 Venkov, “Джентрификация на Женския пазар,” 126–28.
111 Erickson, “Utopian Virtues”; Heil, “Are Neighbours Alike”; Lundsteen, “Conicts and Convivencia.”
112 Wise and Velayutham, “Conviviality in Everyday Multiculturalism”; Junjia Ye, “Spatialising the
Politics of Coexistence: Gui Ju (规矩) in Singapore,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geog-
raphers 41, no. 1 (2015): 91–103; Ye, “Contours of Urban Diversity and Coexistence,” Geography
Compass 11, no. 9 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12327.
38
CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 11
Even when studies of the periphery are hoping to contribute to the theoretical de-
bate their clearer insight on the instrumentality and power contests inherent to
convivial interaction (as reviewed in this paper), their claims remain shouts from
the side of the pitch to the main teams playing. is is why I think it is not fruitful
to make attempts to export the notion of conviviality to new grounds anymore;
rather, it is time to replace it with a notion that has power and instrumentality at its
heart. I propose that to be politics of coexistence.
Author’s biography:
Nikola A. Venkov has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Soa (2017) and
a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham (2009). His interests
are in the eld of urban anthropology, studying power and marginalisation in
urban space and looking at the micro-mechanics of urban redevelopment projects
as political action. More recently, he is doing long-term eldwork in the largest
segregated Turkish and Roma neighbourhood in Bulgaria. His work on these topics
also spills into public and engaged anthropology and collaborative artistic projects.
His theoretical aspirations are in achieving a cross-over between Laclau’s post-
foundational discourse analysis and Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
39
CAS WORKING PAPER SERIES 11
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